Driving truck

I have been dodging the storms so have not had a chance to run Liza Jane recently.

All is not lost though. I have been keeping myself occupied with keeping her in good condition. In particular, I have been paying attention to advice from Polly to check that all the cap-head screws that hold the cylinders to the frames are nice and tight. This isn’t as easy at it sounds as the various stretchers in the frame and the pipework and the water pump conspire to make getting an allen key into the screws very difficult. To get round that problem I have purchased a small Bahco ratchet wrench which takes hex drive bits of all sorts. It is a fantastic addition to the toolbox.

In more major news, I now have a driving truck. I have purchased the combination high and low level truck from Ride on Railways. Unfortunately, the side bars for the high level were too long for our platform but, very helpfully, Ride on Railways have made me a new shorter set so I should have all eventualities covered. Paul at RonR was very friendly and I can highly recommend the truck albeit that, due to the weather, I have yet to use it! I have run it round our track to check the loading gauge and it ran very smoothly with me sat on it on the downhill sections.I

In other news, another Polly has arrived at our club. One of our members has bought a second hand Polly 3 in GWR colours. They (father and son) ran it last weekend and it is another good example of the robust nature of Polly locos as it ran well having not been used in quite a while with just a little bit of attention needed to the injector.